AS MR FIDEL CASTRO THE FATHER OF CUBAN COMMUNISM BOWS OUT: WHAT REMAINS OF COMMUNISM?
AS MR FIDEL CASTRO THE FATHER OF CUBAN COMMUNISM BOWS OUT: WHAT REMAINS OF COMMUNISM?
(Part 2)
By:
Nurudeen Dauda
28/11/16.
nurudeendauda24@yahoo.com
nurudeendauda24@gmail.com
nurudeendauda.blogspot.com
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on Aug. 13, 1926 — 1927 in some reports — in what was then the eastern Cuban province of Oriente, the son of plantation owner, Ángel Castro, the father was a Spaniard Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Fidel Castro had both admirers and detractors in Cuba and around the world. Some saw him as a ruthless despot who trampled rights and freedoms; many others hailed him as the crowds did that first night, as a revolutionary hero for the ages. By handing power to his brother, Mr. Castro once more raised the ire of his enemies in Washington. A sense of destiny accompanied Mr. Castro as he entered the University of Havana’s law school in 1945 and almost immediately immersed himself in radical politics. He took part in an invasion of the Dominican Republic that unsuccessfully tried to oust the dictator Rafael Trujillo. He became increasingly obsessed with Cuban politics and led student protests and demonstrations even when he was not enrolled in the university.
Mr. Castro’s university days earned him the image of rabble-rouser and seemed to support the view that he had had Communist leanings all along. Mr. Castro said“I had entered into contact with Marxist literature,” Mr. Castro said. “At that time, there were some Communist students at the University of Havana. In 1952, he ran for Congress as a candidate for the opposition Orthodox Party. But the election was scuttled because of a coup staged by Mr. Batista. Mr. Castro’s initial response to the Batista government was to challenge it with a legal appeal, claiming that Mr. Batista’s actions had violated the Constitution. Even as a symbolic act, the attempt was futile. Mr. Castro, giving a deposition in July 1953, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leading an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.
Mr. Castro declared . “I do not fear this, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed out the life of 70 brothers of mine. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”Mr. Castro was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Mr. Batista then made what turned out to be a huge strategic error. Believing that the rebels’ energy had been spent, and under pressure from civic leaders to show that he was not a dictator, he released Mr. Castro and his followers in an amnesty after the 1954 presidential election. Mr. Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he plotted his return to Cuba. Newspapers around the world reported his death in the December 1956 landing. But three months later, Mr. Castro was interviewed for a series of articles that would revive his movement and thus change history.The escapade began when Castro loyalists contacted a correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times, Herbert L. Matthews, and arranged for him to interview Mr. Castro. A few Castro supporters brought Mr. Matthews into the mountains disguised as a wealthy American.
Mr. Castro’s alignment with the Soviet Union meant that the Cold War between the world’s superpowers, and the ideological battle between democracy and communism, had erupted in the United States’ sphere of influence. A clash was all but inevitable, and it came in October 1962 . American spy planes took reconnaissance photos suggesting that the Soviets had exploited their new alliance to build bases in Cuba for intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching North America. Mr. Castro allowed the bases to be constructed, but once they were discovered, he became a bit player in the ensuing drama, overshadowed by President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev. Kennedy put United States military forces on alert and ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. The two sides were at a stalemate for 13 tense days, and the world held its breath.
The Soviets were willing to buy all the sugar Cuba could produce. Even as other Caribbean nations diversified, Cuba decided to stick with one major crop, sugar, and one major buyer. But after forcing the entire nation into a failed effort to reach a record 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970, Mr. Castro recognized the need to break the cycle of dependence on the Soviets and sugar. Once more, he relied on his belief in himself and his revolution for solutions. One unlikely consequence was his effort to develop a Cuban supercow. Although he had no training in animal husbandry, Mr. Castro decided to crossbreed humpbacked Asian Zebus with standard Holsteins to create a new breed that could produce milk at prodigious rate. A few of the hybrids did give more milk, and one that set a milk production record was stuffed and placed in a museum. But most were no better producers than their parents.
As the Soviets settled in Cuba in the 1960s, hundreds of Cuban students were sent to Moscow, Prague and other cities of the Soviet bloc to study science and medicine. Admirers from around the world, including some Americans, were impressed with the way that health care and literacy in Cuba had improved. A reshaping of Cuban society was underway. Kennedy’s assassination, and suspicions that Mr. Castro and the Cubans were somehow involved, the 90 miles separating Cuba from the United States became a gulf of antagonism and mistrust. The C.I.A. tried several times to eliminate Mr. Castro or undermine his authority. One plot involved exposing him to a chemical that would cause his beard to fall out, and another using a poison pen to kill him. Mr. Castro often boasted of how many times he had escaped C.I.A. plots to kill him, and he ordered information about the foiled attempts to be put on display at a Havana museum.
The United States economic embargo, imposed by Eisenhower and widened by Kennedy, has continued for more than five decades. But its effectiveness was undermined by the Soviet Union, which gave Cuba $5 billion a year in subsidies, and later by Venezuela, which sent Cuba badly needed oil and economic support. Most other countries, including close United States allies like Canada, maintained relations with Cuba throughout the decades and continued trading with the island.
“I faced my greatest challenge after I turned 60,” Mr. Castro said in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine in 1994. He was referring to the collapse of the Soviet empire, which brought an end to the subsidies that had kept his government afloat for so long. He had also lost a steady source of oil and a reliable buyer for Cuban sugar. Abandoned, isolated, facing increasing dissent at home, Mr. Castro seemed to have come to the end of his line. Cuba’s collapse appeared imminent, and Mr. Castro’s final hours in power were widely anticipated. He chose an unlikely weapon: the hated American dollar, which he had long condemned as the corrupt symbol of capitalism. In the summer of 1993, he made it legal for Cubans to hold American dollars spent by tourists or sent by exiled family members. That policy eventually led to a dual currency system that has fostered resentment and hampered economic development in Cuba.
Mr. Castro, the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, was also willing to experiment with capitalism and free enterprise, at least for a time. Encouraged by his brother Raúl, he allowed farmers to sell excess produce at market rates, and he ordered officials to turn a blind eye to small, family-run kitchens and restaurants, called paladares, that charged market prices. Under Rául Castro, those reforms were broadened considerably, though they were sometimes met with public grumbling from his older brother.
Raúl Castro took more steps to open the economy and, in so doing, dismantled parts of the socialist state that his brother had defended for so long.Fidel Castro’s impact on Latin America and the Western Hemisphere has the earmarks of lasting indefinitely. The power of his personality remains inescapable, for better or worse, not only in Cuba but also throughout Latin America.
“We are going to live with Fidel Castro and all he stands for while he is alive,” wrote Mr. Matthews of The Times, whose own fortunes were dimmed considerably by his connection to Mr. Castro, “and with his ghost when he is dead.”
No doubt Mr Castro was a patriot, revolutionary, anti colonialists, and anti imperialist. However, it is worthy of note that he employed capitalist ideas to save his socialist ideology from collapse. Raul his brother and successor has since embraced the market economy doctrines.